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The programming talent myth

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Re: The programming talent myth

#91

Post by vonmoltke »

gnaritas wrote: post #75
gaius wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

99% of the software that actually matters - medical devices, air traffic control, credit card processing, phone switches, you name it - is written by people who work 9-5 and don't think about their jobs outside work. If all the websites programmed by "rock stars" shutdown overnight, the next week everyone would have forgotten they ever existed.

> 99% of the software that actually matters - medical devices, air traffic control, credit card processing, phone switches, you name it - is written by people who work 9-5 and don't think about their jobs outside work. I don't believe that, you have some evidence for this claim?

I do, but it is all personal anecdotes from having worked for a large defense contractor for almost ten years and a small one for three. Nobody had "passion". Nobody was doing anything in their spare time programming-related beyond some trivial toying around. Then again, the vast majority were Gen-Xers and the stereotypical "work to live" attitude associated with that generation was very visible.

As an aside, I would like to note the difference as I see it between passion and work ethic. There were people who put long hours in, but they did so because there was work that needed doing. In fact, the people who put in the longest hours generally had the least proportion of technical work. They weren't there because they "loved programming"; they were there because they felt they needed to be to help the program and company go forward.

Re: The programming talent myth

#92

Post by jeremiep »

nilkn wrote: post #58

My own experience just does not agree with this at all. First, I think we have to distinguish between two ideas here: * The first is the question of whether anyone can learn to program. I think that for the most part everybody can, just like for the most part everybody can learn high school calculus. * The second is the question of whether programming ability is bimodal. This is not related to the first question, and…

From personal experience, speed has very little to do with productivity. Productivity is a function of knowledge and experience.

The most productive programmers I've met almost always had enough experience in what not to use. They have a clear focus on the simplicity of their code and their ability to reason about it. They understand the problem and the hardware as well as the language in a very detailed manner. They are by nature extraordinarily curious people.

In comparison, the worst programmers I've met were the exact opposite, learning barely enough to get the job done and never digging into the details. Sometimes they don't even understand the hardware they're using. They pick the wrong data structures, think about code first and data is an afterthought.

Productive programmers don't really type faster or think faster. They just make far less mistakes to begin with and such mistakes always inflate the development time exponentially.

Re: The programming talent myth

#93

Post by [deleted] »

vbezhenar wrote: post #85

IMO it's not a talent. It's a result of thousands of hours of work. I learned programming at 12 years. I programmed a lot. I didn't have a computer and I was programming in sheets of paper (computer was in school and I didn't always had access to it). I wrote by own object-oriented GUI library in sheets of paper and that library was never written in computer but it was in my head and I learned a lot while thinking ab…

[deleted]

Re: The programming talent myth

#94

Post by 67726e »

nilkn wrote: post #58

My own experience just does not agree with this at all. First, I think we have to distinguish between two ideas here: * The first is the question of whether anyone can learn to program. I think that for the most part everybody can, just like for the most part everybody can learn high school calculus. * The second is the question of whether programming ability is bimodal. This is not related to the first question, and…

Been screwing with computers since 9 or so, and programming since 11 or so. I'm now about 4 years into my professional career and usually get the typical "amazing programmer" remarks, that I'm fast, smart, good code, beyond my years, etc. I think that a lot of things go into it.

First, practice, practice, practice. I spent waaaaay too much time in high school writing/designing/building projects. By the time I hit university, I could write a compiler or build a web application. Old hat. That's always going to be a hurdle folks who are serious about programming are going to have to get over, I just did it early on so when I started working with others I was ahead of the curve.

The big problem I've noticed among my friends at school that floundered vs the ones that succeeded, and that of the (great) professionals I've worked with is the ability to solve problems. Some folks look at a task like "build a web application" and seize up at enormity of the task. Others, start breaking down the problem into it's component parts. Pick the front-end, back-end tools, database, and drill each piece further down. I think this is just as important, if not more, than raw coding talent, especially since strong problem decomposition skills apply across the board.

I'm regularly amazed/annoyed when folks can't solve trivial computer problems not because they are hard, but because they are afraid to jump into the deep end and start making educated guesses, googling, just plain trying. I'm not a teacher, manager, or any kind of people herder so I'm not really sure how or why folks are like this, but if you just try to tackle the problem, you'll eventually get somewhere. Overtime you build up knowledge, experience, and mistakes and you become that 10x programmer, or that 10x chef, or that 10x .

Re: The programming talent myth

#95

Post by vectorpush »

platz wrote: post #79

"Formal logical proofs, and therefore programs – formal logical proofs that particular computations are possible, expressed in a formal system called a programming language – are utterly meaningless. To write a computer program you have to come to terms with this, to accept that whatever you might want the program to mean, the machine will blindly follow its meaningless rules and come to some meaningless conclusion.…

The findings of this study have been formally retracted by the author.

http://www.eis.mdx.ac.uk/staffpages/r_bornat/papers/camel_hu...

Re: The programming talent myth

#96

Post by vonmoltke »

exstudent2 wrote: post #40
gaius wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is true. But also noone is writing critical systems staying up all night drinking Red Bull. Look at other engineering disciplines. Where are the bridge and dam building rockstars? Where are the nuclear power ninjas? I wonder what "rock stars" are going to do when they discover other uses for their time, hobbies, families, sports, travel and so on. Resign?

I think you're talking about two different things: 1. People that are dedicated to their craft, write A LOT of code and self-study in their free time. 2. Red bull drinking Valley stereotypes. People from camp 1 don't live up to the stereotype of the "rock star" but definitely work way more than 9-5. Where work is defined as studying languages, domain specific knowledge, low-level code...

People from camp 1 also do not generally curate a public profile, since they generally come from traditional engineering cultures where judgements are made based on past experience and ability to reason about complex systems during interviews than on flashy portfolios and pop quizzes.

Re: The programming talent myth

#97

Post by bernardlunn »

My experience totally contradicts this. I am a biz guy but I have been privileged to work with a handful (literally, about 5) developers who are not just 10x better than average but 50x or 100x better. Its like denying Black Swans - rare is different from non-existant.

Re: The programming talent myth

#98

Post by bernardlunn »

My experience totally contradicts this. I am a biz guy but I have been privileged to work with a handful (literally, about 5) developers who are not just 10x better than average but 50x or 100x better. Its like denying Black Swans - rare is different from non-existant.

Re: The programming talent myth

#99

Post by vonmoltke »

shubb wrote: post #71
vonmoltke wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Look at fizzbuzz as an obvious, if not entirely complete, example. I am not entirely convinced this is not partially a resume screening and talent pipeline problem. Has anyone ever given Fizzbuzz problems to everyone who applied to a position? If you haven't, have you ever considered that your screening process may be broken in the sense that you are passing too many liars who then bomb the Fizzbuzz portion, but wh…

I find this idea that there are lots of fake programmers kind of nuts. Presumably, when you do a resume sift, you look for people with either a qualification or work experience. Either they somehow faked it through those, or your test is bad. Fizzbuzz actually tests if you know what % does. Is that critical knowledge for a webdev?

I don't think there are "lots", but I think there are enough to distort the view of the labor pool. Additionally, there is the issue of these fakers staying in the pool much longer and spraying their resumes out more often further distorting the view.

As for how they get through the screen, I think they just blatantly lie on their resume hoping to get a company that doesn't do its due diligence in determining if the stated experience is real.

Re: The programming talent myth

#100

Post by platz »

vectorpush wrote: post #95
platz wrote: post #79

"Formal logical proofs, and therefore programs – formal logical proofs that particular computations are possible, expressed in a formal system called a programming language – are utterly meaningless. To write a computer program you have to come to terms with this, to accept that whatever you might want the program to mean, the machine will blindly follow its meaningless rules and come to some meaningless conclusion.…

The findings of this study have been formally retracted by the author. http://www.eis.mdx.ac.uk/staffpages/r_bornat/papers/camel_hu...

Well I won't be linking that anymore. Anyways, I was really more interested in the little narrative observation above than the numerical results of the study.
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